The Cavalier

I.

SHE WANTED TO LAUGH

Our camp was in the heart of Copiah County, Mississippi, a mile or so west of Gallatin and about six miles east of that once robber-haunted road, the Natchez Trace. Austin's brigade, we were, a detached body of mixed Louisiana and Mississippi cavalry, getting our breath again after two weeks' hard fighting of Grant. Grierson's raid had lately gone the entire length of the State, and we had had a hard, vain chase after him, also.

Joe Johnston's shattered army was at Jackson, about forty-five miles to northward; beleaguered Vicksburg was in the Northwest, a trifle farther away; Natchez lay southwest, still more distant; and nearly twice as far in the south was our heartbroken New Orleans. We had paused to recuperate our animals, and there was a rumor that we were to get new clothing. Anyhow we had rags with honor, and a right to make as much noise as we chose.

It was being made. The air was in anguish with the din of tree-felling and log-chopping, of stamping, neighing, braying, whooping, guffawing, and singing--all the daybreak charivari beloved of a camp of Confederate critter companies. In the midst of it a chum and I sat close together on a log near the mess fire, and as the other boys of the mess lifted their heads from their saddle-tree pillows, from two of them at once came a slow, disdainful acceptance of the final lot of the wicked, made unsolicited on discovering that this chum and I had sat there talking together all night. I had the day before been wheedled into letting myself be detailed to be a quartermaster's clerk, and this comrade and I were never to snuggle under the one blanket again. The thought forbade slumber.

If I go to sleep, I said,--you know how I dream. I shall have one of those dreams of mine to carry around in my memory for a year, like a bullet in my back. So there the dear fellow had sat all night to give me my hourly powders of reassurance that I could be a quartermaster's clerk without shame.

Certainly you can afford to fill a position which the leader of Ferry's scouts has filled just before you.

But my unsoldierly motive for going to headquarters kept my misgivings alive. I was hungry for the gentilities of camp; to be where Shakespeare was part of the baggage, where Pope was quoted, where Coleridge and Byron and Poe were recited, Macaulay criticized, and Les Misérables--Madame Le Vert's Mobile translation--lent round; and where men, when they did steal, stole portable volumes, not currycombs. Ned Ferry had been Major Harper's clerk, but had managed in several instances to display such fitness to lead that General Austin had lately named him for promotion, and the quartermaster's clerk was now Lieutenant Ferry, raised from the ranks for gallantry, and followed ubiquitously by a chosen sixty or so drawn from the whole brigade. Could the like occur again? And could it occur to a chap who could not comprehend how it had ever occurred at all?

By and by we breakfasted. After which, my precious horse not having finished his corn, I spread my blanket and let myself doze, but was soon awakened by the shouts of my companions laughing at me for laughing so piteously in my sleep.

Would I not tell my dream, as nice young men in the Bible always did?

No, I would not! But I had to yield. My dream was that our General had told me a fable. It was of a young rat, which seeing a cockerel, whose tail was scarcely longer than his own, leap down into a barrel, gather some stray grains of corn and fly out again, was tempted to follow his example, but having got in, could only stay there. The boys furnished the moral; it was not complimentary.

Well, good-bye, fellows.

Good-bye, Smith. I have never liked my last name, but at that moment the boys contrived to put a kindness of tone into it which made it almost pleasing. Good-bye, Smith, remember your failings.

Remember! I had yet to make their discovery. But I was on the eve of making it.

As I passed up the road through the midst of our nearly tentless camp I met a leather-curtained spring-wagon to which were attached a pair of little striped-legged mules driven by an old negro. Behind him, among the curtains, sat a lady and her black maid. The mistress was of strikingly graceful figure, in a most tasteful gown and broad Leghorn hat. Her small hands were daintily gloved. The mules stopped, and through her light veil I saw that she was handsome. Her eyes, full of thought, were blue, and yet were so spirited they might as well have been black, as her hair was. She, or fate for her, had crowded thirty years of life into twenty-five of time.

For many a day I had not seen such charms of feminine attire, and yet I was not charmed. Every item of her fragrant drapery was from the world's open market, hence flagrantly un-Confederate, unpatriotic, reprehensible. Otherwise it might not have seemed to me that her thin nostrils had got their passionateness lately.

Are you not a New Orleans boy? she asked as I lifted my képi and drew rein.

Boy! humph! I frowned, made myself long, and confessed I had the honor to be from that city. Whereupon she let her long-lashed eyes take on as ravishing a covetousness as though I had been a pretty baby.

I knew it! she said delightedly. But tell me, honor bright,--she sparkled with amusement--you're not regularly enlisted, are you?

I clenched my teeth. I am nineteen, madam.

Her eyes danced, her brows arched. Haven't you got--she hid her smile with an embroidered handkerchief--haven't you got your second figure upside down? I glared, but with one look of hurt sisterliness she melted me. Then, pensive just long enough to say, I was nineteen once, she shot me a sidelong glance so roguish that I was dumb with indignation and tried to find my mustache, forgetting I had shaved it off to stimulate it. She smiled in sweet propitiation and then came gravely to business. Have you come from beyond the pickets?

No, madam.

Have you met any officer riding toward them?

I had not. Her driver gathered the reins and I drew back.

Good-bye, New Orleans soldier-boy, she said, gaily, and as I raised my cap she gave herself a fetching air and added, I'll wager I know your name.

Madam,--my cap went higher, my head lower--I never bet.

I could not divine what there was ridiculous about me, except a certain damage to my dress, of which she could not possibly be aware as long as I remained in the saddle. Yet plainly she wanted to laugh. I made it as plain that I did not.

Good-day, sir, she said, with forced severity, but as I smiled apologetically and moved my rein, she broke down under new temptation and, as the wagon moved away, twittered after me unseen,--Good-bye, Mr. Smith.

II.

LIEUTENANT FERRY

I passed on, flattered but scandalized, wasting no guesses on how she knew me--if she really knew me at all--but taking my revenge by moralizing on her, to myself, as a sign of the times, until brigade headquarters were in full view, a few rods off the road; four or five good, white wall-tents in a green bit of old field backed by a thicket of young pines.

Midway of this space I met Scott Gholson, clerk to the Adjutant-general. It was Gholson who had first spoken of me for this detail. He was an East Louisianian, of Tangipahoa; aged maybe twenty-six, but in effect older, having from birth eaten only ill-cooked food, and looking it; profoundly unconscious of any shortcoming in his education, which he had got from a small church-pecked college of the pelican sort that feed it raw from their own bosoms. One of his smallest deficiencies was that he had never seen as much art as there is in one handsome dinner-plate. Now, here he was, riding forth to learn for himself, privately, he said, why I did not appear. Yet he halted without turning, and seemed to wish he had not found me.

Did you--he began, and stopped; did you notice a--he stopped again.

What, a leather-curtained spring-wagon?

No-o! he said, as if nobody but a gaping idiot would expect anybody not a gaping idiot to notice a leather-curtained spring-wagon. No-o! did you notice the brown horse that man was riding who just now passed you as you turned off the road?

No, I barely remembered the rider had generously moved aside to let me go by. In pure sourness at the poverty of my dress and the perfection of his, I had avoided looking at him higher than his hundred-dollar boots. My feet were in uncolored cowhide, except the toes.

He noticed you, said Gholson; he looked back at you and your bay. Wouldn't you like to turn back and see his horse?

Why, hardly, if I'm behindhand now. Is it so fine as that?

Well, no. It's the horse he captured the time he got the Yankee who had him prisoner.

Who? I cried. What! You don't mean to say--was that Lieutenant Ferry?

Yes, so called. He wa'n't a lieutenant then, he was a clerk, like you or me.

Oh, I wish I had noticed him!

We can see him yet if you--

Do you want to see him? I gathered my horse.

Me!--No, sir. But you spoke as if--

I shook my head and we moved toward the tents. This was worse than the dream; the rat had not seen the cockerel, but the cockerel had observed the rat--dropping into the barrel: the cockerel, yes, and not the cockerel alone, for I saw that Gholson was associating him with her of the curtained wagon. By now they were side and side. I asked if Ferry came often to headquarters. Yes, quite as often as he's any business to. Ah, ha! thought I, and presently said I had heard he was a great favorite.

Well,--yes,--he--he is,--with some.

Don't you like him?

Who, me? Oh!--I--I admire Ned Ferry--for a number of things. He's more foolhardy than brave; he's confessed as much to me. Women call him handsome. He sings; beautifully, I suppose; I can't sing a note; and wouldn't if I could. Still, if he only wouldn't sing drinking-songs --but, Smith, I think that to sing drinking-songs--and all the more to sing them as well as some folks think he does--is to advocate drinking, and to advocate drinking is next door to excusing drunkenness!

Then Ned Ferry doesn't drink?

"Indeed he does! I don't like to say it, and I don't say he drinks 'too much', as they call it; but, Smith, he drinks with men who do! Oh, I admire him; only I do wish--"

Wish what?

Oh, I--I wish he wouldn't play cards. Smith, I've seen him play cards with the shells bursting over us!

For my part I privately wished this saint wouldn't rub my uninteresting surname into me every time he spoke. As we dismounted near the tents I leaned against my saddle and asked further concerning the object of his loving anxiety. Was Ned Ferry generous, pleasant, frank?

"Why, in outward manner, yes; but, Smith, he was raised to be a Catholic priest. I could a heap-sight easier trust him if he'd sometimes show distrust, himself. If he ever does I've never seen it. And yet--Oh, we're the best of friends, and I'm speaking now only as a friend and toe a friend. Oh, if it wa'n't for just one thing, I could admit what Major Harper said of him not ten minutes ago to me; that you never finish talking to Ned Ferry without feeling a little brighter, happier and cleaner than when you began; whereas talking with some men it's just the reverse."

I looked carefully at my companion and asked him if the Major had said all of that. He had, and Gholson's hide had turned it without taking a scratch. That's fine!--as to Ferry, I said.

"Oh, yes,--it would be--if it was only iso. Trouble is, you keep remembering he's such a stumbling-block to any real spiritual inquirer. Yes, and to himself; for, you know, spiritually there's so much less hope for the moralist than what there is for the up-and-down reprobate! You know that,--Smith."

My silence implied that I knew it, though I did not feel any brighter, happier or cleaner.

"Smith, Ned Ferry is not only a Romanist, he's a romanticist. We--you and me--are religionists. Our brightness and happiness air the brightness and happiness of faith; our cleanness is the cleanness of religious scruples. Worst of it with Ned is he's satisfied with the difference, I'm afraid! That's what makes him so pleasant to fellows who don't care a sou marquee about religion."

I said one might respect religion even if he did not--

"Oh, he's always polite to it; but he's--he's read Voltaire! Oh, yes, Voltaire, George Sand, all those men. He questions the Bible, Smith. Not to me, though; hah, he knows better! Smith, I can discuss religion and not get mad, with any one who don't question the Bible; but if he does that, I just tell you, I wouldn't risk my soul in such a discussion! Would you?"

I could hardly say, and we moved pensively toward Major Harper's tent. Evidently the main poison was still in Gholson's stomach, and when I glanced at him he asked, What d'you reckon brought Ned Ferry here just at this time?

I made no reply. He looked momentous, leaned to me sidewise with a hand horizontally across his mouth, and whispered a name. It was new to me. Charlie Toliver? I murmured, for we were at the tent door.

The war-correspondent, whispered Gholson; don't you know? But the flap of the tent lifted and I could not reply.

III.

SHE

Major Harper was the most capable officer on the brigade staff. I had never met a man of such force and dignity who was so modestly affable. His new clerk dined with him that first day, at noon in his tent, alone. Hot biscuits! with butter! and rock salt. Fried bacon also--somewhat vivacious, but still bacon. When the tent began to fill with the smoke of his meerschaum pipe, and while his black boy cleared the table for us to resume writing, we talked of books. Here was joy! I vaunted my love for history, biography, the poets, but spoke lightly of fiction.

The smoker twinkled. You're different from Ned Ferry, he said.

Has he a taste for fiction? I asked, with a depreciative smirk.

Yes, a beautiful story is a thing Ned Ferry loves with a positive passion.

I suppose we might call him a romanticist, said I, might we not?

The patient gentleman smiled again as he said, Oh--Gholson can attend to that.

I took up my pen, and until twilight we spoke thereafter only of abstracts and requisitions. But then he led me on to tell him all about myself. I explained why my first name was Richard and my second name Thorndyke, and dwelt especially on the enormous differences between the Smiths from whom we were and those from whom we were not descended.

And then he told me about himself. He was a graduate of West Point, the only one on the brigade staff; was a widower, with a widowed brother, a maiden sister, two daughters, and a niece, all of one New Orleans household. The brothers and sister were Charlestonians, but the two men had married in New Orleans, twin sisters in a noted Creole family. The brother's daughter, I was told, spoke French better than English; the Major's elder daughter spoke English as perfectly as her father; and the younger, left in her aunt's care from infancy, knew no French at all. I wondered if they were as handsome as their white-haired father, and when I asked their names I learned that the niece, Cécile, was a year the junior of Estelle and as much the senior of Camille; but of the days of the years of the pilgrimage of any of the three children he gave me no slightest hint; they might be seven years older, or seven years younger, than his new clerk.

To show him how little I cared for any girl's age whose father preferred not to mention it, I reverted to his sister and brother. She was in New Orleans, he said, with her nieces, but might at any moment be sent into the Confederacy, being one of General Butler's registered enemies. The brother was--

"Out here somewhere. No, not in the army exactly; no, nor in the navy, but--I expect him in camp to-night. If he comes you'll have to work when you ought to be asleep. No, he is not in the secret service, only in a secret service; running hospital supplies through the enemy's lines into ours."

I was thrilled. I was taken into the staff's confidence! Me, Smith! That Major Harper would tell me part of a matter to conceal the rest of it did not enter my dreams, good as I was at dreaming. The flattery went to my brain, and presently, without the faintest preamble, I asked if there was any war-correspondent at headquarters just now. There came a hostile flash in his eyes, but instantly it passed, and with all his happy mildness he replied, No, nor any room for one.

Just then entered an ordnance-sergeant, so smart in his rags that the Major's affability seemed hardly a condescension. He asked me to supper with his mess--"of staff attatchays," he said, winking one eye and hitching his mouth; at which the Major laughed with kind disapprobation, and the jocose sergeant explained as we went that that was only one of Scott Gholson's mispronunciations the boys were trying to tease him out of.

I found the clerks' mess a bunch of bright good fellows. After supper, stretched on the harsh turf under the June stars, with everyone's head (save mine) in some one's lap, we smoked, talked and sang. Only Gholson was called away, by duty, and so failed to hear the laborious jests got off at his expense. To me the wits were disastrously kind. Never had I been made a tenth so much of; I was even urged to sing All quiet along the Potomac to-night, and was courteously praised when I had done so. But there is where affliction overtook me; they debated its authorship. One said a certain newspaper correspondent, naming him, had proved it to be the work--I forget of whom. But I shall never forget what followed. Two or three challenged the literary preeminence of that correspondent, and from as many directions I was asked for my opinion. Ah me! Lying back against a pile of saddles with my head in my hands, sodden with self-assurance, I replied, magnanimously, Oh, I don't set up for a critic, but--well--would you call him a better man than Charlie Toliver?

Who--o? It was not one who asked; the whos came like shrapnel; and when, not knowing what else to do, I smiled as one dying, there went up a wail of mirth that froze my blood and then heated it to a fever. The company howled. They rolled over one another, crying, Charlie Toliver!--Charlie Toliver!--Oh, Lord, where's Scott Gholson!--Charlie Toliver!--and leaped up and huddled down and moaned and rolled and rose and looked for me.

But, after all, fortune was merciful, and I was gone; the Major had summoned me--his brother had come. I went circuitously and alone. As I started, some fellow writhing on the grass cried, Charlie Tol--oh, this is better than a tcharade! and a flash of divination enlightened me. While I went I burned with shame, rage and nervous exhaustion; the name Scott Gholson had gasped in my ear was the name of her in the curtained wagon, and I cursed the day in which I had heard of Charlotte Oliver.

IV.

THREE DAYS' RATIONS

In the vocabulary of a prig, but in the wrath of a fishwoman, I execrated Scott Gholson; his jealousies, his disclosures, his religion, his mispronunciations; and Ned Ferry--that cockerel! Here was I in the barrel, and able only to squeal in irate terror at whoever looked down upon me. I could have crawled under a log and died. At the door of the Major's tent I paused to learn and joy of one to whom comes reprieve when the rope is on his neck, I overheard Harry Helm, the General's nephew and aide de-camp, who had been with us, telling what a howling good joke Smith had just got off on Gholson!

We shall have to get Ned Ferry back here, the Major was saying as I entered, to make you boys let Scott Gholson alone.

The young man laughed and turned to go. "Why doesn't Ned Ferry make her let Gholson alone? He can do it; he's got her round his finger as tight as she's got Gholson round hers."

Harry, replied the Major, from his table full of documents, don't you know that any man who's got a woman wrapped round his finger has also got her wrapped round his throat?

The aide-de-camp laughed like a rustic and vanished. Smith, said the Major, your eyes are--

I've been awake for forty-eight hours, Major. But--oh, I'm not sleepy.

Well, go get some sleep.--No, go at once; you'll be called when needed.

But I was not needed; while I slept, who should come back and do my work in my stead but Ned Ferry. When I awoke it was with a bound of alarm to see clear day. The command was breaking camp. I rushed out of the tent with canteen, soap and comb, and ran into the arms of the mess-cook. We were alone. Oh, yass, seh, he laughed as he poured the water into my hands, th'ee days' rairtion. Seh? Lawd! dey done drawed and cook' befo' de fus' streak o' light. But you all right; here yo' habbersack, full up. Oh, I done fed yo' hoss. Here yo' jacket an' cap; and here yo' saddle an' bridle--Oh, you welcome; I dess tryin' to git shet of 'em so's I kin strak de tent.

As I mounted, our wagonmaster rode by me, busy as a skipper in a storm. Oh, here! he cried, wheeled, and reaching something to me added, that's your pass. Major Harper wants you as quick as you can show up. He says never mind the column, ride straight after him. Keep this road to Hazlehurst and then go down the main Brookhaven road till you overtake him. He's by himself--nearly.

As the rider wheeled away I blurted out with anxious loudness in the general hubbub, Isn't his brother with him?

He flashed back a glare of rebuke and then bellowed to heaven and earth, Oh, the devil and Tom Walker! I don't keep run of sutlers and citizens! He took a circuit, standing in his stirrups and calling orders to his teamsters, and as he neared me again he said very gently, Good Lord! my boy, don't you know better than to shoot your mouth off like that? You'll find nobody with the Major but Ned Ferry, and I don't say you'll find him.

I galloped to the road. Away down through the woods it was full of horsemen falling into line. With the nearest colonel was Lieutenant Helm, the aide-de-camp. I turned away from them toward Hazlehurst, but looked back distrustfully. Yes, sure enough, the whole command was facing into column the other way! My horse and I whirled and stood staring and swelling with indignation--we ordered south, and the brigade heading westward! He fretted, tramped, neighed, and began hurriedly to paw through the globe to head them off on the other side. He even threatened to rear; but when I showed him I was ashamed of that, he bore me proudly, and I sat him as proudly as he bore me, for he made me more than half my friends. And now as the aide-de-camp wheeled about from the